Abstract
Understanding historical drought changes is critical to water resource management, vegetation growth, and human life in arid regions with vulnerable and sensitive ecological environments. Based on the Schrenk spruce (Picea schrenkiana) sampled from the whole Tianshan Mountains located northwestern China, we developed a tree-ring chronology to study the dry–wet changes through multiple sites sampling. The results showed the stable significantly positive response of tree-ring width chronology to the standardized precipitation and evapotranspiration index (SPEI) in current April and May, indicating that the tree-ring of Schrenk spruce contained the stronger signal of drought variation at the beginning of the growing season. Therefore, we reconstructed the SPEI from 1735 to 2016 in the study regions with 55.1% of the explained variance of reconstruction equation for 1960–2016, which verified the high accuracy of the reconstructed results. Droughts had alternated over the past three centuries with 14 distinct dry and wet periods. Analyzing the 282-year reconstructed drought showed a significant tendency to become wet for the study regions, which were also well correlated with historical droughts and volcanic eruptions events. The SPEI in the study regions was influenced mainly by large-scale atmospheric–oceanic variability with spectral analysis (MTM) revealing some significant low-frequency periods (53.7–78.7, 15.6–16.7, 7.7–8.2, 5.2–5.3, 3.7–3.9, and 2.1–2.2 years). In particular, the HYSPLIT model proved that the westerly circulation was the driving force of the dry–wet changes in the Tianshan Mountains and that the water vapor originated mainly from the North Atlantic.
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This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Projects No. 41861006 and 41630750), CAS “Light of West China” Program (2020XBZG-XBQNXZ-A) and the Scientific Research Program of Higher Education Institutions of Gansu Province (2018C-02).
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All authors have contributed to this manuscript and have approved the final version. Wang S designed the project, conducted the field and laboratory work, and wrote the manuscript. Jiao L and Jiang Y contributed to the writing and discussed the data. Liu X, Chen K, and Liu X did some of the laboratory work.
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Wang, S., Jiao, L., Jiang, Y. et al. Tree-ring-based drought-pluvial variation in the Tianshan Mountains of northwestern China. Theor Appl Climatol 148, 1727–1740 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04028-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04028-1